Individuals participating in contact sports, such as football, hockey, or baseball, and other physical activities may suffer injuries to the head and neck. Sometimes, significant damage may occur causing concussions, brain damage, skull fractures, paralysis, and even death. Protective athletic helmets can provide head and neck protection for individuals participating in such contact sports and other physical activities and can help reduce and sometimes prevent head and neck injuries.
For example, football players often wear protective athletic helmets to help reduce or prevent injury to the head caused by frequent collisions with other players and the ground. Such protective athletic helmets often include a shell, an internal padding assembly, and a chin protector or strap that secures the protective athletic helmet to a user's head. Unfortunately, however, such protective athletic helmets often lack adequate shock absorption, are too heavy, or in some cases lack adequate rigidity or flexibility to effectively protect a user's head and reduce or prevent injury. While current protective athletic helmets may be effective at reducing some single impact injuries to the head such as skull fractures, such protective athletic helmets are often less effective at reducing or preventing multiple impact head injuries such as concussions.
To that end, it would be advantageous to provide an improved light-weight protective athletic helmet configured to help reduce or prevent multiple impact head injuries such as concussions. The improved protective athletic helmet utilizes a durable outer shell, a flexible inner shell, and a shock absorbent middle layer. The shock absorbent middle layer includes a plurality of shock absorbent hemispheres and a plurality of foam pads. The outer durable shell is configured to move independently from the inner flexible shell and the shock absorbent middle layer, so as to absorb and redirect energy resulting from an impact force to the durable outer shell. It is to such an improved protective athletic helmet and to methods for using thereof that exemplary embodiments of the inventive concepts disclosed and claimed herein are directed.